Is there a way to use acrobat with the command line?

I use Acrobat with the windows command line to display PDF files by:
C:\"Program files"\Adobe\"Acrobat 11.0"\Acrobat\Acrobat\filename.PDF
where the above is actually pdfread.bat and filename.PDF is %1
%1 allows any filename to be entered, i.e., pdfread filename.pdf
I use a similar construct to print text from a PDF display.

The question: are there any other ways to use Acrobat from the
Windows command line? It's too tedious to use Acrobat to convert
postscript to PDF using the gooey and I often have to do it hundreds of times. Right now I use ps2pdf which gave poor color results until I added a couple of options which gave Acrobat quality but took up twice as much disk space for the results.


boyden


2 Answers

There are two different applications involved in what you describe: Acrobat to display a PDF file and Distiller to convert from PostScript to PDF.

As you know, you can specify the filename on the command line. There are a few (very few) other options available on the command line. This document has more information:

http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_open_parameters.pdf

Distiller is different from Acrobat (but it comes as part of the Acrobat package). You can run Distiller from the command line. Take a look at the Distiller API:

http://help.adobe.com/livedocs/acrobat_sdk/11/Acrobat11_HTMLHelp/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm?&accessible=true

Expand the following tree:

Distiller Command Line Options

Karl Heinz Kremer
PDF Acrobatics Without a Net
PDF Software Development, Training and More...
http://www.khkonsulting.com


Karl Heinz Kremer   

With Acrobat Professional one not only gets the Action wizard for Acrobat but a hot folder, Watched folders, for distiller.

Watched folders once set up let one copy any PS file into the "In" sub folder of the "Watched" folder and Distiller when running, will detect the added file and process the PS file and move the resulting PDF to the "Watched" Out sub folder along with the log file and input PS file. If one has Distiller set up, only the log files for failed conversions will be kept.

I have folders on a network drive and feed files from my desktop and remote desktop at the same time and Distiller just chugs away. One can even designate multiple folders as "Watched" folders with no problems.

At one time I even had multiple desktops systems all pointing the same Watched folder into which I transferred over 1,500 PS files and each desktop processed the next free PS file in turn.

Note the Distiller application was running on a local system and only used networked folders for input files and saving output files. This is not a violation of using the application on a network server because the application was on a desktop not a network server.

Acrobat Help /Creating PDFs with Acrobat Distiller


George Kaiser   


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